Educating Those Who “Flip a Pizza Crust”
No common wealth of education in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The Middlebrow doesn’t seek to be political. This is about enjoying culture, whatever your perspectives on taxation, law, war, and the environment. Ballet, opera, poetry, science, and art create spaces where people with differing views can exchange ideas without resorting to cable news tactics. The Middlebrow also believes that culture is for everybody, so long as people know where to look. Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics speak mostly to specialists, but he wrote popular books as well. The joys of knowledge for its own sake are universal, even if unsupported by an economy that encourages practical knowledge (know what you need to know to do your job).
This all starts with education, a topic fraught with issues of political economy. In Pennsylvania, parents have sued lawmakers in Commonwealth Court, alleging that the practice of funding school districts through local property taxes has created education inequities so severe as to deny poorer students their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law. Jonathon Kozol studied and wrote about the effects of unequal school funding driven by property-tax budget distributions way back in 1988. By robbing people of educational opportunities early in life, we entrap them in both ignorance and poverty. Cut off from education, the human mind will convince itself that some topics, disciplines, and ways of thinking are beyond them. Over time, a prison imposed by resource constraints becomes a cell locked from within.
When Matthew Splain, a superintendent of a rural Pennsylvania school district pointed to poor standardized test performance in biology as evidence that his system is under-funded, defense lawyer John Krill, seeking to absolve the state government of responsibility countered:
“What use would a carpenter have for biology?”
Krill then asked, “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?”
Krill later opined: “Lest we forget, the commonwealth has many needs. There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”
Raised in the later years of The Cold War, The Middlebrow had often been told by adults that young people in the Soviet Union and China were sorted by academic performance and test results and then shunted into lifelong occupations. This is apparently now the goal of Pennsylvania’s countryside public schools. If the state doesn’t believe that artisans, skilled trade professionals and service workers should understand biology in the face of a global disease outbreak, what value could the state possibly place on their exposure to music, art, and poetry?
As the economy grows ever more competitive and specialized, and as mechanization and machine learning edge humans out of even the haughty “knowledge professions” this question of who learns what and for what purpose is not at all restricted to underfunded public school districts. We’ve built an economy that favors law over philosophy, marketing over journalism and applied mathematics over the theoretical. But we need philosophers, journalists, and theoreticians, even if they’re tough to pay for.
We also need a society of citizens, if we’re going to have democracy (or the American system, which could possibly work, too). Convincing people that they’re not intelligent enough to participate in self-governance is an effective way of disenfranchising them. But set that aside – who do you want to live around? A farmer who understands that what’s dumped into an irrigation canal winds up in the lake, or one who doesn’t? Neighbor children directing their energies outside of school to athletic and artistic pursuits, or hopeless children who see the drudgery of fast food in their futures and have aggression to express about it now? Because we do have to live together.
The promise of a universal liberal arts and civics education, which would encompass at least basic exposure to mathematics and the major sciences, is that well-rounded people make the best thinkers and decision-makers. They can be creative and contribute to society’s innovation. Maybe that does mean learning how to flip a pizza crust.
The worst part of this argument, whether you take Krill’s side or The Middlebrow’s, is to fall into accepting the premise and skilled and service professions constitute some sort of servant class. Maybe somebody will spend their career in a casual or fast service restaurant. That might mean they have massive contributions to make. The manager of a single location diner might have insights into operations that can turn the enterprise into a regional or national chain. Maybe they develop a dish or recipe that turns an obscure restaurant into a destination. Guy Fieri is thoroughly Middlebrow. Maybe they organize their colleagues into a union so that everybody gets more out of their work. It could happen.
If you want none of those things for or of your food workers, at least consider this – a basic understanding of biology means they’ll only put the patty that fell on the floor into your sandwich if they really don’t like you.
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Ever wonder how stars like Jay-Z build and keep their wealth? Zack O'Malley Greenburg spent a decade researching such fortunes for Forbes (while authoring books like Empire State of Mind and A-List Angels). Now he's writing the Zogblog—a weekly newsletter on the intersection of music, media and money—and serializing his next book, We Are All Musicians Now, via Substack. Click here to get both for free.